Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Journal Sentinel's Misplaced Priorities!



By Jeff Simpson

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, has called for Milwaukee Brewers owner Mark Attanasio to "end their relationship" with Ryan Braun. 

Ryan Braun has to go.

Milwaukee Brewers owner Mark Attanasio has an opportunity to make the most powerful statement any owner has ever made about what the game of baseball should be and what it should not be. Attanasio can make a statement that would reverberate across the many other venues of professional sports infected by the plague of doping.

The Brewers should end their relationship with Braun. Only then can the organization "move on."
There has been a lot of talk about "moving on" from members of the team, the general manager and even Attanasio in the past 24 hours that indicate that they still don't get it.

Braun's drug use taints the team's National League Central Division championship in 2011 and its victory over Arizona in the playoffs that fall. Braun cheated his team. Even worse, he cheated his fans. No matter how much they may wish it away, the Brewers will not close this sad chapter until Braun is gone.

 In the meantime, Attanasio has a chance to make the Milwaukee Brewers franchise an example for the rest of professional sports: He can do that by getting rid of Ryan Braun.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is THE same newspaper that endorsed Scott Walker, not once but twice!     The same paper that runs Politifact, which has given our Governor the dubious distinction of biggest liar amongst Governors in the US, for two years running.

The same Governor whose Governing goal was to "divide and conquer" and has turned Wisconsin into a political hotbed and divided our state.   

Apparently, they hold the left fielder of the Milwaukee Brewers to a much higher standard than they do anyone in Wisconsin State Government!   

Unfortunately for the people of WI, the Brewers left fielder has done more to create jobs and improve our economy than our Governor has!   



6 comments:

  1. The JS Editorial Board is going to hold Ryan Braun to a higher standard than the Governor of Wisconsin??? Give me a break! The JS and the other corporate media in Wisconsin has given Scott Walker a free pass to LIE, and LIE, and LIE for his entire political career, but now wants the guillotine to fall on Ryan Braun's neck. HYPOCRITES!!!

    Same for all the right wing radio jocks that have thrown Ryan Braun under the bus but haven't held Governor Walker to .01% of the standards for lying and deception.

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  2. The urinal sentinel is irrelevant. Ryan took performance enhancing drugs and so has many other athletes. If the righteous want to go after the drug problem, go after the leagues and demand better accountability in managing players. The players really are not the issue, they are just another byproduct of corporate greed. The pressure the players are under to hold up the franchise is incredible.

    Paul Ryan lies almost every time he opens his mouth, where's all the backlash?

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  3. In the whole barrage and firestorm of negative commentary, I haven’t been able to find out what it was, exactly, that Braun was ingesting. That grab-all acronym “PED’s” describes everything from the old time injected steroids that killed Lyle Alzado and John Matuszak, to the “harmless” creatine/protein powder type products you used to be able to get from health food/nutrition supplement stores like GNC. There’s also a full range of non-steroidal treatments that starts (on the less threatening end) with compounds that mimic or stimulate natural body responses or hormones (ephedrine), to extremely complex pharmaceutical cocktails specifically designed to stimulate athletic performance. At the same time, there are medical procedures (“blood doping”) that do not involve any drugs or chemical supplements, which can provide a temporary performance boost that might make a
    critical difference, when administered to athletes in certain sports. (Think, “Lance Armstrong.”)

    That whole, huge dark cloud of “PED” fakery -- can’t be understood if you’re not also looking at the much wider, sun-lit, bright sky of "natural,” universally understood and encouraged sports training techniques. Which begin with a foundation of good nutrition, regular exercise and conditioning that can become as focused and
    scientific as an industrial process.

    Not to leave any doubt or uncertainty -- all of it, every phase or aspect of "athletic conditioning and training" -- has to be looked at in the larger context of the multi-billion dollar industry that professional sports are in the U.S. I mean, we close schools, layoff teachers and firemen and who knows what else, but public tax dollars continue to subsidize the building of new stadiums and arenas. (How long has the Journal been lobbying its readership for a new home for the Bucks?)

    So, what was it, exactly,
    that Braun was doing, that he's deserving of such harsh blame and public shaming.

    He's the guy that also sacrificed *literally* millions of dollars to sign a long-term deal with the franchise. He could have been gone to a bigger market team by now, or maybe he would have been poised to do it in a year or two, the same as Grienke and Sabathia and (no hard feelings, bro') Prince Fiedler.

    The rush to judgment – with a laser-like focus on the alleged sins of an individual, without beginning to question the larger issue of that person’s limited place in a wider world or
    universe – is exactly what we’ve seen before, whether it’s the “traitors” Bradley Manning or Eric Snowden, or the “pervy losers” like Wiener or Spitzer.

    .....Journalism has become another name for "public shaming." Only the stocks and pillory are all-digital. Whether it’s the completely bogus, almost unendurable discussion of Wiener’s wiener I listened to on Chicago’s “progressive” radio, WCPT, for over two hours, earlier today (courtesy of “The Stephanie Miller Show”) it's just a ratings game to pick apart human victims, without beginning to look at the wider universe in which those people live.

    None of it serves any responsible purpose, it's just infotainment, mindless distraction, or gossip.

    ....Because it's good for ratings, it's good for a buck, and in the ultra-competitive Media game, that's not sacrificing ethics for expediency, it's their mission statement. To find and explore "guaranteed revenue streams," where no Milwaukee journalists have gone before.

    It's obvious from the amount of space that the publishers of the Journal-Sentinel have regularly given over to the column-inch equivalent of paid advertising -- feature columns for P.R. meisters like comedian Christian Schneider -- that if they also had the opportunity to enhance their earnings or profit statements with some kind of chemical enhancement, their crack and meth and speed-ball bills would be sky high, today.

    So long as it screwed the individual, the little guy, and kept the Big Money rolling in.

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    Replies
    1. Thanks... Posted anonymously because OpenID wasn't -- and still isn't -- open. I get an error message every time.

      ...Anyway, a P.S. to say this started out as a quick response to outstanding sports journalist Dave Zirin at The Nation, then was slightly edited over a lunch break to provide some feedback to your (similar) take on the story.

      http://www.thenation.com/blog/175393/down-goes-ryan-braun#

      I just wanted to make the point that until we know exactly where on that gradient continuum of PED foul/dark/awfullness Ryan Bran falls -- closer to the Alzado/Matuszak Dead Football Player black pit, or more towards the slippery-slope ephedrine/creatine end of the scale -- we should withhold the comparisons to Lance Armstrong, or Benedict Arnold, or Atilla the Hun.

      The fact that so few have done so tells us more about ourselves, and the state of the media and journalism today, than it does about Braun, or the Brewers.

      I'd still be willing to bet (if Aaron Rodgers will cover it) that Ryan (or maybe his trainers/nutritionists/medical staff) will turn out to have been trying too hard to find a legal competitive edge.

      Those giant publicly-funded stadiums -- besides being money-makers -- have to total pressure-cookers, too. When you're the face of the franchise, and you really want to help the team, and the fans who support you and pay all the bills, maybe... he got and took some bad advice.

      We just don't know yet.

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  4. IMHO, there would have been no recall without Dan Bice's reporting on the John Doe investigation. Once the recall was scheduled, the JS dropped the story, because they wanted the ad revenue from Walker's oligarchs.

    IMHO, it's important to separate the mostly? union reporters who work in the JS newsroom from Charlie Sykes. The JS is the only media outlet with a sufficient footprint to take on local and national law enforcement on a variety of tough issues. They have and they deserve credit for preserving what little is left of our First Amendment rights.

    As much as AFSCME understandably dislikes JS coverage of them, they all owe a huge debt to Meg Kissinger and her editors.

    Those stories, "pity liberalism," however force them to straddle right on a lot of their other coverage. IMHO, that's caused by 20 years of among a variety of things, Steve Smith (J RN chair) letting Charlie Sykes use his "50,000 watt blow torch" to basically destroy the JS brand.

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